Jean-hugues Anglade

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Insinuating and enigmatic filmmaking adds to the central mystery of this intensely personal odyssey, which gets under the skin even as it begins to feel a bit meandering and ill-defined. But of course, Huppert is magnificent.

Ann (Huppert) is rattled one evening by two events: she sees her partner Thomas (Beauvois) kissing another woman and she runs into Georges (Anglade), an old friend who knew her before she became a famous pianist. Suddenly she decides to leave her current life behind, dumping Thomas, selling her flat and hitting the road. And Georges is the only person she tells; to everyone else she has simply vanished. She ends up on an isolated Italian island, where her life is redefined by her new friends (Bindi and Sansa). But can she fully escape her past?

If someone asked me to identify a prototypical "art film," I could do no better than to point them to Elective Affinities, a low-budget period piece from Italy, featuring circuitous dialogue, a story based on a Goethe novel, and an absolutely awful title.

Elective Affinities tracks a foursome in a Tuscan villa who couple in a variety of formations. There's bad feelings and a baby, but most of all there's a whole lotta talking about emotions -- with a pseudo-scientific explanation of love as a mathematical equation (which, sort of, explains the title).

Betty... Betty's got issues. Loads of them. So many issues that they made a movie about her that runs over three hours long.

As Betty, Béatrice Dalle makes her screen debut, taking on the role of a young and brazen twentysomething that's clearly -- painfully -- stricken with some mental illness and probably more than one. As we meet her, she's visiting her new boyfriend Zorg (excellent name), played by Jean-Hugues Anglade, and much of their three hours on camera is filled with various forms of foreplay, sex, and afterplay, with Betty spending the intervening hours in various stages of undress.

More Van Dam-age as our favorite musclebound Belgian, once again as a twin!, goes on a rampage in search of revenge or well, a clue, when his until-then-unknown twin shows up dead in a Paris street. Off to New York. Fights ensue. Van-Damme kicks a lot of ass. Explosions occur. The end.

Or just Nikita, as it was called before some guy at Samuel Goldwyn decided that they needed to make absolutely sure everybody knew the film was French and tacked-on that "La Femme." The film that made the career of Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, The Messenger) starts off on a Paris street as a quartet of jacked-up junkies, including Nikita (Anne Parillaud), stride over rain-slicked cobblestones towards the drugstore they're going to rob for their fix. After a shootout with the police, Nikita kills one of the cops in cold blood. Sentenced to death and supposedly executed, Nikita is instead secreted away into a government program where she's trained to become a secret agent.

For the greater part of her time in the program, Nikita acts like the addict-in-withdrawal that she is, ignoring her trainers and pulling a gun on her handler, the incongruously-named Bob (Tchéky Karyo). Then, threatened with a couple of weeks to get her act together, the antiauthoritarian punk becomes the perfect student. Before we know it, three years have passed and she's ready for her graduation present - an assassination mission at a restaurant that turns into a guns-blazing melee. Like the film's pulse-pounding beginning, it's an impressive bit of mayhem, mostly for the incongruous sight of Nikita, in her chic black cocktail dress, scurrying through a kitchen, blasting away with a massive handgun at thugs packing assault rifles and grenade launchers. But, whereas the opening scenes were shocking in their amoral ferocity, this shootout - including a scene where Nikita dives down a laundry chute to escape a blossoming fireball - shows Nikita to be just another action movie, with the usual tenuous-at-best grip on reality.